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Its obviously easier since mojang has been so kind to remove herobrine every update

"Surviving the first minecraft nights are just considered an inconvenience" Speedrunners: What's the first night?

I just picked up Minecraft for the first time two weeks ago. Had never played it and knew next to nothing about it. Everything you described about the experience of “the old days” of Minecraft is how I’ve felt playing it. When you have ZERO knowledge of the game, it is absolutely still hard. I’ve been getting wrecked. People have just been playing it for a decade and don’t realize how good they’ve gotten at it.

Some features were implemented easier, like the bed, sprinting, and enchantments, but arguably, the biggest thing that’s made it easier is experience and information. It became common knowledge how to survive, where to find iron, Diamond, etc. even 1.18, which changed a lot of established things, the community has already broken down the new “Meta”, meaning anyone who looks for it can find all the info they need to practically become a survival pro. Already.

This is like how humans at first were getting destroyed by the other animals until they learned to make tools and created civilisations

Anyone who's ever tried to move villagers from one place to another knows the game is more difficult than ever.

I think Minecraft was much more arcade back in the day. You know, easy to learn hard to master. Nowadays it's much more complicated with enchantments, trades, new bioms etc, but when you understand how those mechanics work it becomes rather simple

I'm surprised that the increase in available food wasn't also mentioned. For example, he mentioned that the addition of the hunger bar made things harder, but alongside that, so many more mobs also became able to drop food, such as lamb, rabbit, cows, chickens etc. So acquiring food also became much easier compared to alpha.

"When sprinting there are no other mobs besides bosses that can catch you." *Java edition baby zombie:*

Back in my day a pickaxe was the only tool you needed

honestly i think it’s fine. after a decade of knowledge and experience with the game your skills will certainly evolve and you’ll find the game far easier

It's pretty OP that food could instantly heal you back then, but it also wasn't stackable which meant that you had to use your food as effective as possible

Players in new versons of the game: Man Minecraft is so difficult, I only found 5 diamonds after an hour of mining. Players in Minecraft Alpha/Beta: Some guys get all the luck. I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning I break my legs and every night I break my arms. At night, I awake in agony until my heart attacks put me back to sleep.

Honestly i wouldnt even call most changes lowering the difficulty but rather quality of life changes that simply had the side effect of making the game easier.

I pretty heavily disagree with a lot said in this video. I will admit, hunger and sprinting have somewhat made the game easier, but overall I think the main thing making the game easier is the general increase in skill within the community. What you're talking about is an increase in knowledge, ability and a fundamental change in what it means to be "late game". Gold farms today are pretty good. I don't think anyone will argue with that, but oddly, farming zombie pigmen was a lot better pre beta 1.8 (update that added hunger) as they dropped cooked porkchops which by todays standard would be like a mob always dropping splash potions of instant healing. Along with this pigmen never calmed down meaning you don't need to worry about running a farm overnight and spawn conditions being just right to ensure you don't get enough pigmen to continue the agro chain. So why was nobody building big pigman farms in beta? because they didn't know how. A really good video to illustrate this on a smaller scale is one Mumbo Jumbo did a while back where he went back to beta and made redstone contraptions. He was able to make way smaller piston doors then anyone had made in beta before because he was bringing years of experience. Speaking of mumbo, you mention him getting a full diamond way really fast when X couldn't over an entire lets play, but fail to point out the primary difference between how those two are playing. At what point did X mine a staircase down to y = 9 and strip mine for a couple hours off camera? I haven't seen his lets play but I'm guessing he didn't, yet now thanks to so many people having played minecraft and shared their knowledge strip mining is one of the most common practices in minecraft. You also mention enchantments quite a lot. While I will admit enchantments make the game way easier, you gloss over how you get them. It requires 5 diamonds to start getting even basic enchantments, and you then you need a way to get xp to actually get enchanted items. I imagine if enchantments had been in the game in alpha or beta, very few people would have used them due to not having enough know how to get diamonds. You can kind of see this with minecraft content that came out a year or two after 1.0. It took people a while to actually start using and abusing enchantments like we see today because they still didn't have the knowledge of how to effectively get diamonds and xp. You also mention structures and villager trades. In terms of the structure argument, how is a golden apple any different from betas insta heals? Other then the fact you can't easily amass god apples. In terms of villager trades, where did you learn to amass emeralds? Where did you learn which was the best way to do so? How did you learn that the best way to get the enchanted book you wanted was to break and place the job site over and over? Where did you learn to make the iron farm for the anvils you need to put enchanted books to use? For almost everyone, they didn't figure out villagers, someone else did and they shared it with the community. All of this culminates into a change within minecraft because of its community. Building a pigman farm to get infinite porkchops in beta was not considered late game, it was unheard of. Now building a piglin farm to achieve the same goal (the reward being much weaker due to game changes) is considered a feat accomplished by someone dipping their toes into late game. Having a full set of diamond armor in beta was deep into late game, now it's the middle or end of early game. The closest comparison I can make to this is people saying running has gotten easier because the records keep getting lower. The new rubber tracks didn't make it easier, our knowledge has just pushed the sport to new heights. The game didn't change, we did.

You forgot to mention that one time item, that makes fighting mobs basically non chalenging - shield.

Well it’s definitely got less scary I used to be terrified playing alpha

The NOSTALGY hits when you see an old minecraft survival video. I remember being afraid to go to caves because of herobrine and how the creepers were super scary.

I haven’t watched yet but I just wanna leave my thoughts here really quick. It’s become easier in the sense of going through the loops of the early game because villages trivialize progression, ruined portals have good loot, ores are gonna be real easy to find in 1.18, etc but with that comes the new challenge of creating more. How much more can we build and find? Everything can be automated but when you have so much at your fingertips, it becomes harder to find joy in things. Kinda depressing but that’s how I see this question. It’s also why I try to avoid huge farms for stone or wood or huge super smelters, and why I only really travel through the nether when I absolutely must so that I have things to do and so that I can see the beautiful world generation.

Ironically the game is less about surviving or mining now. Villagers and structures can get you most of the materials you need. Everyone seems to be thinking of simply fighting or building a farm when talking about difficulty when in reality there is just no early or mid game like there used to be. We now start at the end of mid-game basically. Resources are much more abundant even without farms and netherite, while a fun addition, is kind of unnecessary.

The only thing that made it easier, was people like MumboJumbo and his buddies inventing crazy farms. Also, we just got better at the game as we grew

As a Minecraft boomer who played since nearly the beginning: In a lot of ways yes, in some ways no.

I must say, it is much better that minecraft's objective isn't just surviving anymore

4:10 having no beds in minecraft didnt force you to face dangers it forced you to afk untill the night was done

To begin, we should define "easy" as easiness has 2 forms, complexity and difficulty. Over the years, minecraft has traded difficulty for complexity, making the game easier to clear, and making it easier to do massive builds, but in doing so it has become a more complex web of mechanics and understanding everything takes much longer.

6:13 this reminded me of what Grian said earlier in his latest vid when Bdubs blew up: "It's been a while since someone died to a Creeper"

Fun fact: It wasn't just that Minecraft didn't have a "brightness slider" back in the day that made the nights so dark, in an update notch actually made nights a blue shade of darkness rather than black. It really made the nights easier to see even when the brightness slider was set to "moody".

I think people who find it "too easy" now have their sights set low in terms of goals - no offence. Yeah, you can just run away from enemies or skip the night with a bed. Maybe if you know exactly what you're doing, set up a quick farm for endless wheat, and slog through a couple hours of single minded mining, you can get full diamond easily... then it's just a matter of finding a nether fortress and then getting to the End... but is that really all there is to the game? MC used to be a harder, but not better. It's much more fun, complex, and open-ended to what you can do with it now - if it was the same game as it was in 2011, most people still wouldn't be playing it today.

I think there’s also the fact that everyone knows how to play Minecraft now. Back in the day, no one knew anything. But as time went by, more people knew what to do.

I feel like the gane itself got easier, and the players increased there standards to make it harder.

I think each update has added something new that makes the game a little easier because of quality of life improvements, but makes it harder in different ways due to challenges added. Some examples: 1.13 The Aquatic Update - You can properly swim now, and there's now plenty of fish for easy access to food and bones...but caution is needed when swimming as Pufferfish don't like being touched, and Drowned will harass you if you stay in the water too long (or anywhere if one of them has a trident). 1.14 Village & Pillage Update - Campfires, Smelters, and Smokers have been added to make cooking/smelting faster, but at the cost of more resources and experience generated. Villages have been given a massive overhaul, and Villagers can be assigned jobs instead of praying for RNG, but Pillagers have been added in that can deal substantial melee damage or hit you from afar with crossbows, and if you're not careful you can accidentally trigger a raid on your unprotected village. 1.16 The Nether Update - "Trees", food sources, and gold nugget ores are introduced to the Nether to allow for better survivability and resource gathering, but the trees are difficult to grow (requiring certain mushrooms, blocks, and bonemeal), the food source fights back (and will push you around), and Piglins will swarm you if you dare break their precious gold. New biomes were also introduced for the new resources, but traversing them is just as (if not more) dangerous than before as one biome has more lava pits & magma blocks, and there an increased number of pissed off mobs waiting to ruin your day (Skeletons now appear, an increase in Endermen, Magma Cubes reign supreme in Basalt Deltas, etc). 1.17 & 1.18 Caves and Cliffs - So many new environments and blocks have been added to explore! But Snow Powder blocks make mountain climbing dangerous as you and your animal companions unwittingly start to sink and freeze to death, and watch out for those sharp drops! I'm sure there's more, but I hope you get what I mean!

I agree that it’s harder, actually. Instead of creating difficult game mechanics, I think Mojang has created another difficult challenge entirely: setting and achieving goals as a self-driven player. The original alpha and beta versions were focused entirely on living for as long as possible, like a zombie survival horror type game. But now, surviving is just a way to enable you to achieve your own goals, no matter what it is. And I think this is why Minecraft will forever be a popular game. There is a near infinite amount of replayability, and it rests on the player’s own shoulders to find new and exciting things to do using the tools that the developers have given us, and sometimes even tools that we create ourselves. Community and creativity is what makes this game difficult. And I think it’s a lesson that we can bring to real life too-you must learn how to be independent and create a life that you want to live, and you should be given the ability and freedom to do so.

Something you forgot to mention was that in the early versions of the game there was no tutorial or instructions, you simply had to figure out how to play on your own. Now there are guides, forums, videos, and in game tutorials to teach people how to play the game. So in a way Minecrafts rise to popularity and the more content released for it made it much easier just within the fact that people could find out how to play before buying or investing many hours into the game.

I remember when unenchanted Diamond Swords were OP, and they would two-shot every hostile mob.

I feel like you spent a long time talking about mid/end game features in modern minecraft to show how easy modern minecraft has become, while also trying to prove that alpha was harder by talking about how much harder early game was. I will say that sprinting and structures have probably made the early game easier, but villagers, enchants, and potions have not. One other thing, the use of the comparison between Xisuma's old survival lets play and Mumbo's first episode of Hermitcraft. For starters, 1 episode of hermitcraft most certainly takes much longer to make that 1 episode of Xisuma's letsplay way back in beta. Yes, it does show there was a bigger emphasis on survival 9 years ago, but it does not prove that minecraft was any harder. If you watch the first episode of Grian's EvoSMP, it is clear to see that people are just better at the game the now, and they spend more time making their videos. He comes away from the first episode with iron and diamond tools and a small starter house.

They should make hardcore harder so people who like Minecraft currently can still play it like normal but players who want the challenge of surviving can play hardcore.

I don’t feel like Minecraft was ever meant to be difficult, I feel like the game does better to foster creativity. Large scale SMPs on KZfaq also help most players learn effective play strategies.

I think another variable that should be address is "information access". When i used to play beta with my friends, there was little to no info on where the diamonds (level) could be found. There was no in game recipe book/charts so you had to figure out or look on some distant internet page. Guides were basics and repetitive and most of the strategies we know today weren't properly developped or known. I could not just look for a super efficient " something" farm that can be build in a minute. It was about figuring it yourself.

My viewpoint on this discussion can be summed up by a single quote from Wall-E: "I don't want to survive, I want to LIVE." Minecraft is more fun when you aren't just dying and losing your stuff every five minutes, and when you don't have to grind for hours just to get diamond gear.

So I feel like the first few nights have become easier, but we have also become a lot more knowledgeable about the game. I personally play on the moody brightness setting, so the darkness setting is kind of a moot point at least for me

"The difference between rare armor such as diamond and easier to get armor, *such as leather"* What do you mean? Leather is obviously harder to get

I feel like caves are gonna become harder in the caves and cliffs update Edit: this comment was made 5 months ago, back when the snapshots were still releasing. stop arguing

no joke, since you can trade paper (which is made from sugar cane) for emeralds, which can be traded for full diamond armor, tools and mending/unbreaking books, you could get a full set of unbreaking 3 mending diamond armor and tools just from making a fairly simple sugar can farm.

I think the problem about minecraft's difficulty is the lack of challenges. Yes, the deep dark cities will be tough because you'll need to be cautious every second, but other than that, currently there isn't any challenges. Also about bastions, if you carry boats to trap brutes, it's easy. If you don't, you'll probably die because of the crammed and crumbled design making things like getting cornered by a brute, getting yeeted by a hoglin, or just falling into the lava easier

Back in my days, shovels mined wood just as quick as axes.

the addition of enchantments made the game "easier" and I say easier in quotation marks because all it means is that in late-game, grinding takes less time and mobs aren't as annoying

I was actually so sure it was easier during the whole runtime of the video but the point you gave at the end of it kind of made me rethink my view on difficulty, now i don't know what to think about it. XD thank you for the great video!

Early game is the most interesting and challenging part for me. I've always loved early games in different titles and fell in love with Minecraft because of survival and grinding aspects. Recently I've been watching old episodes of TerraFirmaCraft and understood why is it so good and interesting for me. Mod creator managed to drastically enlarge early game and my thoughts about this connected with your video. Now a day, in Minecraft I could get myself diamond in 30 minutes of gameplay. It SUCKS. why the hell would you even need early game items if you scrap them immediately (talking about you, wooden pick). It's that feeling, when you have nothing, when you struggle with most basic tasks, when you fear for your life - that's what keeps me going. Tfc managed to do that, even though you can respawn. I'm not that interested in building automated farms, giant castles and big goals. I want simple, but challenging life, but mojang forgot about players like me.

enchanted golden apples had a recipe back then, now it is changed to be uncraftable and you can only find it in loot chests

Imagine a *Hardest* difficulty, which brought back some of the difficult parts of old minecraft, as well as some new additions: - No sprinting - Night is slightly longer - Beds exist, but they don't skip the night. - Brightness is locked on Moody - Enchantments function, but are slightly less effective - Potions also ^ - Armor is slightly worse - You have less luck in finding good loot in structure chests - Mobs do slightly more damage - Trading/Bartering won't help you journey to the end. Hard/Normal would still be the default gamemode, obviously, but Hardest is for those who want more challenge.

1:24 Warden be like: Fine, I'll catch him myself....

the 1.11 food mechanics make the game really easy, you basically get a regen potion just from eating food

My answer: yes but actually no

If Minecraft didn’t change it would’ve died out. Im thankful for the changes because it has allowed me to have countless memories over the course of 10 years

The Warden killing full netherite in 2 hits watching this: "What were you saying again?"

No it hasn’t in my eyes. The game may have better enchantments for amor and weapons now but mobs are just as hard as they’ve ever been. Creepers still get you, witches get you, phantoms get you, drowns get you.. list goes on. Also this game isn’t easy for new comers. My friends who haven’t played it before have had it pretty challenging learning literally everything from the start.

No, you've just gotten better at it. This is very evident when you watch people play modern MC for first time.

First time playing Minecraft 6 years ago: couldn’t see and unknowingly attracted 30 zombies and skelebones. I rarely play survival because of the trauma 8 year old me experienced that day

A good idea is more hostile wild life, not like more monsters, but just More animal wild life that would naturally be aggressive. Or pillager patrols. Would be bigger and more common. More fights could halt players from resource and progression. A sprint meter and faster mobs could be great, or even pillagers on horses.

It’s crazy how we used to play Minecraft back in the day when u started a new world you made yourself a cave home instantly without a thought feeling safe in that 4x4 block home hearing all the mobs outside just cuz you couldn’t run away or even had a shield to protect yourself. I really do wish we get that same feeling again some day but I know for a fact new players will have this type feeling but we need a mode that makes mobs more hard even tho u have hard mode and hardcore I feel it’s not enough for skilled players

"Has minecraft gotten easier?" Soulsand valleys: *n o*

A more fitting name for "Survival" mode should be "Conquest"

I think it has gotten easier all around, but the joy of Minecraft isn't its difficulty, so that really isn't an issue. Even now, there are still dangerous situations, so the danger isn't gone, and I imagine traversing the new cave gen will be more difficult than before, so every update isn't removing difficulty. I find that the difficulty of older Minecraft came mostly from a lack of solutions to problems, which have either been solved by updates, or by inventions discovered by the community.

another thing is the golden apple used to a healing item that you could mass produce and would heal you to 100% health every single time you used one, meaning you could make yourself invincible pretty much. They may have also been stackable but idk.

You forgot about the new combat, now can block almost everything with a shield, as long as you have a single piece of iron. And the stone axe is one of the best weapons in the game since it does as much damage as a diamond sword. You can kill a cow in 1 (critical) hit with a stone axe. So in my opinion it became a lot easier because of this reason.

I think we find it “easy” because we’ve been playing it for years and the survival aspect of it is second nature to us, but for someone who has never played it, it’s actually quite a difficult game. I watched jackfilms’ stream where he played Minecraft for the first and it was so interesting to see how little got done throughout the whole thing. Also I never realized how little guidance the game gives you as a new player

old blunt minecraft was so fun and way more of a chalenge

I agree with a lot of the things you say hear, but when it comes to minecraft let's plays, especially Hermitcraft, they just don't show 4 hours of mining. But I definitely agree with you.

I remember playing MCPE as a chikd and I could never craft a bed so I spent the first night in a hole waiting and waiting

Also users knowledge cumulatively increased like efficiently mining, putting torch only right side to be able to backtrack etc, which also made game easier

0:54 i think i agree with Fluffyboi, to a certain degree. The game is hard if you don't know what you're doing, but we've been playing for years and know exactly how to survive and create things.

There is a video about how Minecraft tried to hard to be like terraria that basically explains why the game has gotten so easy. Basically they want to add more and more structures and challenges but also want to have the loot for them be rewarding so late game items keep getting easier and easier to get. Diamond are so common nowadays you can spawn and there be a chest with diamonds in it next to you. They keep trying to make more things to do but end up trivializing the actual process of progression and make it so easy that by the time you have diamond armor and a couple enchantments your practically unkillable.

I would like a new difficulty even tho I keep dying with maxed out gear

It hasn’t gotten easier; we have just discovered most of Minecraft’s secrets.

Yknow, I always wondered why I missed the first couple versions of Minecraft. I love the current version way more but there was just something about the old versions that I missed so badly but couldn’t figure it out. But you put it into words for me. It was the survival aspect and the fear the game gave you. It truly felt like the world was actually against you. I loved the fear feeling of running ( or rather, walking ) and hiding from mobs that I would consider as minor threats to this day. And the thrill of knowing that I survived from the mob and lived. The game truly was a good survival game because it made you feel afraid for your life and feel ecstatic when you would survive. Though, the game becoming easier makes total sense. This game isn’t just a survival game. It allows you to experiment and be creative and you really put what Minecraft is about into words. Minecraft truly is just about accomplishing your own goals. You wanna fight mobs? Go ham. Wanna build a large farm, grab them animals. You wanna create large pictures of anime girls…. Go ahead? As much as I really miss the survival feeling of the old game, it needed to become easier in order for these other possibilities to exist. If it weren’t for the survival aspect being lowered, Minecraft wouldn’t be the creative and beautiful game it is today.

maps and F3. I don't know when F3 was added, but I used to get lost for hours above ground or in caves. I'd eventually find my base just over a mountain or across a lake, then I was back home safe, having had an adventure exploring the lands around where I started.

you forgot ONE teeny tiny thing... *SHIELDS ARE A THING NOW*

This guy: Minecraft is becoming too easy Me: dying in in my hardcore world *The thumbs-up cat crying*

About the potions, trading and other stuff: i see them as a challenge to be, and avoid them and focus on other things. Instead of beating the game and advance, i like to build. Only

A big part of it feeling easy is the game is old. Like I’ve been playing Minecraft for 10 years. So I know a lot about the game. Also guys like grian and mumbo jumbo have tons of videos full of tips and tricks and tutorials

"it made the game easier by making it less grindy." I hate it when people say shit like this for anything. Required time spent is NOT difficulty. It doesn't take skill to do the same thing over and over to collect resources.

This video was very informative, i was wondering why me and my friends could all beat the game in an hour these days compared to 2011 and 2012, ngl i like the difficulty aspect more so i tend to play on older versions now anyways

Inovations, Exploits, Farms, Strats and etc made Minecraft easier like way back there was no coordinates and we had no idea where diamonds spawn

Love the reference to X's Adventures in Minecraft at 0:30, what a hit of nostalgia..

It's definitely gotten more complex. Methods of obtaining endgame gear , food, and 'beating the game' (killing the dragon) have become easier, but that doesn't mean the game is too easy. A lot of features were just annoying, like a lack of a brightness setting or inability to sprint, and I don't think they made the game easier per se, just better.

I wrote a long paragraph explaining my thoughts on difficulty in Minecraft while listening to the video and you mostly said it all by the end. Further, the more types of things they add the more types of goals you make and the more types of effort you need for them. However, I can't get over the introduction of Charcoal. Being able to make a light source from renewable materials was great, but being able to make a light source from literally the first things you'll grab (wood and cobblestone for charcoal and furnace) meant there was no longer a first night issue.

I remember playing Minecraft years ago, and fearing the night, the first night was really something for me, but now a day night don't fell really like a night

I mean, simply for me: Before enchants harder to get abundance of resources (no fortune enchant) Even when levels introduced, used a full 30 levels to enchant an item fully then back to 0. No Flying before, No sprint before to evade. So many different ways to get items from chests now, before basically just dungeons. The game has become a lot more noob friendly and just easier in general for anyone to progress, but obviously more experience in this games makes it easier. But fresh starting the game now is a lot easier than if you were fresh starting back then, we couldn't even stack food, no efficiency to get things done quick it was a mad grind.

Back in my days of playing Minecraft getting diamonds is basically end of the game

I’ve thought this for awhile. Terrain used to be challenging because we had no easy travel. Terrain has not kept up with the mobility increases in this game.

I doubt most of the community played minecraft for its challenges. Its the freedom to explore, build, and just sandboxing with friends. I love the convenience features. I love that they made it easy. I can build mega structures way faster than if I were to play beta and alpha.

Yeah, i love old minecraft, but i always hated how dark it was. i always play on 100% brightness, because on moody everything is too hard for me to see even during the day, i guess my eyes dont pick up the light very well because i know a lot of people play on moody just fine

Is this a good way to say it? Back in the day, you failed more often, and today, you succeed less

The hunger mechanic they added in Beta 1.8 arguably made the game easier, actually. Food wasn't stackable in Beta, so you'd have to try to avoid getting damaged as much as possible because you couldn't carry as much food with you as you do now (plus, a skilled player who can avoid damage more effectively would need to carry less food with him and therefore have more inventory space left for gathering resources). Nowadays the hunger system makes the game quite hard during the first few days, but once you've built any sort of food farm you've basically got free health regeneration at all times, making the game MUCH easier than before.

The addition of the bed made the game more convenient, not easier, because at any time, you can just dig 3 blocks down and place another one on top of you : Bam! Instant safety box. The only thing that can kill you at this point is the boredom of waiting for the night to pass. Unless you decide to dig further and go mining, but there's only so much mining you can do before it becomes boring too. Adding the bed is just necessary for good game design at this point : It prevents the players from optimizing the fun out of the game, by allowing them to just skip the night rather than just waiting it out in real time.

One thing that was stronger/easier in the earlier versions of the game was cobblestone for its wayfinding abilities This was because there was an 'L' shape on the cobblestone texture which always faced north-west. This meant that newer players always have a way of finding other players based on direction from spawn. You can do anything you'd need to with this with F3 now but there's still a difference between a wall of text and a compass in my opinion. I remember back in the day using cobblestone combined with actual directions to find bases and locations where my friends were playing. The fact that even something simple like that is missing from the game now is honestly pretty sad. now it's all about the coords which isn't a bad mechanic but it makes the process all about the beginning and the end, not the journey in-between and for an open world game like minecraft the entire point is the journey. I remember back in the day following directions like. "Go north until you see the mistake, then east until you find an amazing mountain that you'd love to build a base on but can't because you'd never be able to build something good enough, then follow the river at the bottom of the waterfall until you find the field of craters which spawns an unusual amount of creepers and then go north until you find the admin's god complex and we're like 1k blocks west of that" Back in the day the journey was fun, and allowed you to familiarize yourself with your map and surroundings. Oh, by the way "The mistake" used to be a common way of referring to builds which were abandoned after someone built their fireplace too close to any wood, and their build mostly burned down.

I mean, I still build square houses in Survival.

I remember once accidentally falling asleep while playing mc with full netherite, and around 3 AM I woke up at 6 hearts still. You don't even have to worry about anything with the best enchants from the best armour.

there is also the power of documentation, knowing how mechanics works and where things are. you only need to look online for what you do not know how to get. (height of diamonds and other ores, how to build certain farms and so on. hoppers are a powerful tool as well!)